A few weeks ago, news came across the wire that a North Carolina man robbed a bank in order to be imprisoned so that, never mind the obvious downsides of the arrangement, he could at least have health care.

A half-century ago, novelist Edward Abbey imagined a kindred scheme, one that turns on the cowboy code of honor, as quaint then as it is now. In The Brave Cowboy, a ranch hand named Jack Burns gets himself arrested in order to free a friend of his whom he believes to be wrongly imprisoned. The problem is, his friend doesn’t want to be busted out; in the hoosegow, he’s got three squares, and escaping would only make his life difficult. It’s up to Burns, then, to spring himself, a plan that, naturally enough, the local sheriff frowns on once it is put into effect.

In the film version of 1962, called Lonely Are the Brave, Burns (Kirk Douglas), gallant on horseback, is on a collision course not just with the sheriff (Walter Matthau), but also with the urban, mechanized civilization that he so roundly rejects. (See Abbey’s book Desert Solitaire for the distinction between civilization and culture.) In that scenario, it is man and horse against helicopter and truck. The outcome is not hard to imagine, whence the desire of Douglas, who optioned the film and had a script written for it, to call it The Last Cowboy. For reasons unknown, the studio overruled him.

Kirk Douglas reportedly considers it his best performance and favorite film among the many great movies he has made, which is endorsement enough. The script is by Dalton Trumbo, a victim of the McCarthy-era blacklist, who had some thoughts on civilization versus culture of his own. Philosophically charged and beautifully acted and photographed (in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, as urban a place as New York), it’s one of the best contrarian westerns ever committed to film.